EFCC And Former Governors

10 June 2011

editorial

Sometime last April, after the governorship elections, the nation’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) was reported in most national dailies to have perfected plans to pick up a handful of state governors who they have investigated for sundry ‘corrupt practices’, just after their immunity would have elapsed last May 29.

There were, the reports said, about 15 governors on EFCC’s watch list, including a handful of their accomplice-commissioners.

It was a startling revelation to corruption-fatigued Nigerians who have been wondering whither the government’s anti-corruption pretensions. The thinking had been that Farida Waziri, the chairman of EFCC, had finally decided to ‘do something’ concrete concerning the task before her.

The report was even more significant for suggesting that President Goodluck Jonathan may after all be up to the bill in tackling this singular most antidevelopment cancer that has virtually stunted both the nation and citizens’ socio-economic growth.

But that is as far as EFCC’s activist confrontation with the alleged corrupt high and mighty has gone so far. Since the swearing in of the new governors and loss of the immunity their predecessors used to enjoy, not one of the alleged treasury looters is in EFCC’s net or is even being quizzed.

Some of the names mentioned in connection with corruption in the past include former governors Orji Uzor Kalu, Chimaroke Nnamani, Saminu Turaki, Bonny Haruna, Jolly Nyame, Abdulahi Adamu, James Ibori, Lucky Igbinedion and others. And we ask: How many of their cases have been concluded so that they can be cleared or penalised? Their arrests, detention and arraignment were widely celebrated but thereafter, not much has come out of their cases.

The report of the planned arrest of some of the immediate past governors would, therefore, appear to be another attempt to give the impression that something serious is about to be done concerning the anti corruption crusade which many believe is floundering.

The fact that none of them has been called in for questioning, indeed, must mean that the EFCC has nothing concrete on them as yet or has chickened out of the chase. Neither reason gives cause for cheer considering what appears a consensus, that unless the monster called corruption is slain, the nation would continue to be held down by the chains of underdevelopment.

The question must also be asked: Was it right and proper to have publicly labeled some people treasury looters on the pages of newspapers when there was no intention, evidence or capacity to prove the allegations?

Or was the report put out merely to stampede those fingered into scampering out of the country?

For far too long, agencies like the EFCC have come out to make headline-grabbing statements that they do not have the intention to justify. For insance, during his tenure, former EFCC chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, had stood in the halls of the Senate to proclaim that of the then 36 state governors only a handful had no cases against their names. Most of those then alleged to be corrupt are walking the streets of Nigeria, Europe and America free as the air.

This leads to the suspicion that EFCC’s pronouncements are mere sound and fury signifying little or practically nothing that matters.

It is not as if the EFCC is powerless to make an impact even considering the limits that observance of rule of law places on its operations and the impediments that the judiciary constitutes regarding the length of time that cases brought to it takes, but clearly the Commission should not go to the press with claims it cannot readily substantiate.

The case of ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, is apposite. After the high profile US Hollywood style-drama surrounding his arrest and detention, the charges preferred against him upon arraignment had seemed like an anti-climax.

And the fear is that Bankole may end up walking away to begin to enjoy extended adjournments and injunctions that would not allow him to clear his name or to be penalized in case he is found to be culpable. .

It may, indeed, be the case that the judiciary frustrates EFCC’s efforts at getting quick judgments. Perhaps it is also the case that the National Assembly, fearing for its members’ personal interests, has not been supportive of amendments to the EFCC Act or even of the setting up of special courts that would fast track the trial of corruption cases which have severally been canvassed, especially by the current leadership of the Commission.

But the simple and very disquieting fact is that Nigerians are at the threshold of suffering from what could be referred to as ‘corruption fatigue,’ an ailment that threatens to turn them off whenever issues pertaining to corruption are mentioned, especially by the nation’s anti-graft agency, EFCC.

Nigerians need to see more of their treasury looters in jail rather than strolling about in peace or loitering around the corridors of power, as many of them have managed to do in recent years.

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